An inept Pakistan policy: Modi government commits big mistake by cancelling talks and cutting Hurriyat out

From the moment news broke that the Modi government had cancelled the foreign secretaries’ talks scheduled for August 25, the Indian media have been accusing Pakistan of sabotaging the talks by scheduling meetings between the Hurriyat and its high commissioner in Delhi, and refusing to heed a plea from the Indian foreign secretary to postpone these till after the talks.

The truth is a little more complicated. Delhi has known that Abdul Basit telephoned the Hurriyat leaders to come to Delhi not at the last minute but on August 10. According to Greater Kashmir (August 13), Islamabad wanted an update from them on developments in the Valley for the meeting in Islamabad. Such consultations had become routine after India and Pakistan began to talk peace bilaterally, in earnest. The Pakistan high commissioner himself spoke openly about it at a social gathering just two days earlier.

The volte face on Monday, August 18, therefore came not from Pakistan but India. Foreign secretary Sujatha Singh made her request only hours before Basit’s first of the scheduled meetings, when the Hurriyat leaders were already in Delhi. This made it impossible for Islamabad to accede to it. PM Nawaz Sharif had already been roundly criticised at home for not meeting the Hurriyat when he came to Delhi for PM Modi’s inauguration. Acceding to such a peremptory last minute demand when he was besieged at home by Imran Khan and the Canada-based Barelvi preacher Tahir-ul Qadri would have been political suicide.

PM Narendra Modi now has two options: to reject everything that the Vajpayee and Singh governments achieved in the past 11 years and go back to square one, or gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of Indo-Pak relations, and make a fresh start with Kashmir and Pakistan in the near future.

The first step on the latter road is to acknowledge that he is not the sole patriot, or indeed the sole custodian of India’s national interest. In January 2005, when Pervez Musharraf sent then PM Shaukat Aziz to New Delhi and Hurriyat flocked to the capital to meet him, then PM Manmohan Singh faced the same dilemma but adopted a very different course of action.

Through an intermediary, he tried to persuade them to observe diplomatic protocol by meeting him first, before they met Aziz. Since Singh had met the Hurriyat leaders through me three years earlier, he asked me to be the intermediary. I spent the entire day urging, cajoling and eventually warning the Mirwaiz, Butt and Bilal Lone that they would irretrievably turn the PMO against them if they insulted not only the PM but also the Indian state. But they refused to budge. Only in the late afternoon did Hurriyat chairman Abdul Ghani Butt explain why: “If we do this”, he told me bluntly, “we will be killed”.

To anyone not familiar with Kashmir’s tragic history this would have sounded like self-expiating melodrama. But Butt’s confession took the wind out of my sails. For beginning with the assassination of Mirwaiz Umar Farouq’s father Maulvi Farouq on May 21, 1990 (three weeks after he gave an interview to BBC outlining requirements for a return to peace) and ending with the assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone exactly 12 years later, each and every Kash-miri nationalist leader who dared to discuss, or even consider, a solution within the Indian Union, had been assassinated by ISI agents.

ISI had, in fact, administered its most recent punishment for disobedience only eight months earlier when it arranged the assassination of Maulvi Mushtaq Ahmad, the Mirwaiz’s uncle, and torched his family’s 100-year-old school in Srinagar, when he did not succumb to its threats and met deputy prime minister L K Advani on February 2, 2004, for a second round of talks on Kashmir.

Butt’s own brother had been killed by the same agency in 1996, so his and Hurriyat’s fear was understandable. Despite that, by refusing to meet Manmohan Singh first, they burned their bridges with NSA Narayanan and, as subsequent events have shown, hastened their descent into irrelevance.

But Singh did not prevent the meeting with Aziz. He allowed Hurriyat leaders to interact freely with Pakistani decision-makers in Delhi and Islamabad, and kept his doors open for them. By doing that he kept the Kashmiris a part of the decision-making process, and brought India and Pakistan within a whisker of resolving the Kashmir dispute in 2007 before the judges’ crisis fatally weakened Musharraf.

Monday’s action may make BJP look tough, but it has severely hurt India’s long-term interests. It has revoked the commitment previous governments, including Vajpayee’s, made to keep Kashmiris within the decision-making process. And it has sealed the doom of Hurriyat and all ‘separatists’ who had tacitly accepted the Manmohan-Musharraf formula for peace.

Modi has damaged even the so-called mainstream parties, for the anger he has provoked in the Valley will make the boycott of the coming state election far more effective. PDP, which brought Kashmir close to the end of militancy in 2008, will be the main sufferer.

In the longer run, the weakening of both the mainstream parties and Hurriyat will leave the field open for the final fight – between the real separatists who are the Ahl-e Hadis and radicalised youth of Srinagar, and the Indian state.